Diana in Search of Herself (20 page)

Chapter 8

O
nce the engagement had been announced, Diana moved into Clarence House, the home of the Queen Mother.
That night Diana dined with Charles and his grandmother—an occasion Diana did not mention when she subsequently complained that
“nobody” was “there to welcome me.” Three days later, Diana settled into her own apartment in Buckingham Palace, where she was to stay until the royal wedding on July 29.

In theory, the palace was filled with people who could help ease Diana into her role. As her sister hoped, Buck House, as it is often called, did provide a wall behind which Diana could hide from the invasive press, but her sense of security ended there. With its endless rooms and more than 200 employees, Buckingham Palace is a forbidding place, more like a large apartment and office building than an embracing household. Each member of the royal family has a separate apartment, and a sense of isolation is almost inevitable, since the royals spend a great deal of time alone when they are in residence, often dining separately. “At the door you are met by footmen and then you walk down echoing corridors and you don’t see anyone except the occasional cleaner,” said a man close to Prince Charles.

Diana had a suite consisting of a sitting room, bedroom, bathroom, and small kitchen. She was assigned a maid and footman, and although she had grown up with servants, the footman remarked to Charles’s valet, “
What shall I do? Lady Diana never seems to ask for anything.” By her own
later admission, her view of royal life had been astonishingly simplistic: “I had my own money and lived in a big house, so it wasn’t as though I was going to anything different.”

She occupied her time with wedding preparations such as shopping, making lists, and writing thank-you notes, assisted by her mother or her new private secretary, Oliver Everett. She was so eager for company that she sought out footmen and maids to chat with, showing an informality unheard of in the royal family. (Though in keeping with her need to maintain control,
she bristled when any servant took the liberty of addressing her in an overly familiar way.) But much of the time she was by herself, watching soap operas, doing needlework, or tap dancing for hours—to the point, recalled Charles’s valet Stephen Barry, that she “
quite ruined the music room parquet.”

“
The Prince of Wales has made everything far easier for me,” Diana told reporters a few days before her wedding. Reflecting back on this period in later years, however, Diana spoke in withering terms about the royal family and the courtiers of the royal household—the high-level staff who served the family.
She said they treated her coldly, and she complained that no one helped her learn the ropes: “I was just pushed into the fire.” She hastened to add that she managed by dint of her upbringing, although her behavior indicated otherwise.
In her first official appearance, she said she was confused about such basics as which hand to use for holding an evening bag, and whether to precede Charles when making an entrance. Said her former employer Mary Robertson, “
Diana told me … she’d received virtually no support or advice from the royal family, ever.”

Diana came from a family of courtiers; her own father had been an equerry to King George VI and to the Queen, and her Spencer and Fermoy grandmothers had been ladies-in-waiting to the Queen Mother. The top layer of courtiers have traditionally been upper-class men drawn from the elite public schools and the officer corps of the military. They serve as private secretaries—actually chief advisers to each member of the royal family—press secretaries, equerries who help plan and supervise official trips, and an array of assistants. One level below are officials who work as accountants and office managers; the bottom rung in the household is occupied by footmen, maids, butlers, and other servants who operate “below stairs.”

The various ladies-in-waiting to the Queen and other female members of the royal family also come from aristocratic backgrounds, but their positions are not as prestigious as the male courtiers. “The lady-in-waiting is part secretary and part servant,” said a woman close to the royal family. “She is responsible for answering correspondence, and when someone like me comes to visit, the lady-in-waiting has to offer me a drink and carry my bags.”

Pay for the senior courtiers has historically been low, but the prestige and the perks are considerable. Courtiers often receive free lodging in “grace and favor” apartments attached to the royal residences, travel widely, and carry a sense of importance that comes with proximity to royalty. It is a culture that encourages sycophancy when dealing with members of the royal family. As Stephen Barry noted with understatement, “
Few people voice criticism of what the Prince of Wales chooses to do.”

The conventional wisdom is that Diana received “
less training in her new job than the average supermarket checkout operator.” Yet there is ample evidence—including effusive letters of gratitude from Diana—to indicate that she received a great deal of help from the moment she entered Buckingham Palace. Jonathan Dimbleby described the way several advisers tried “
to instruct her in the ways of the court and what they saw as her duties.… They explained that her future role as consort … would be more complicated than she might have realized, and that her husband would not be at her side as often as either of them might have wished. They also told her that … she would always be expected to walk somewhat in his shadow.”

Diana seemed to take in these instructions while actually feeling overwhelmed and resentful, an attitude that grew out of her insecurity, her determination to stick to her old habits and patterns, and her reflexive mistrust of those around her. The courtiers and members of the royal family were tentative in their dealings with her. “
I don’t think any of them really helped her,” said Michael Colborne, who was an aide to Prince Charles at the time. “They didn’t resent her, but they were apprehensive about her. Was she going to be molded?” The courtiers may have thought they were doing the right thing, but they misunderstood the profound challenges posed by a vulnerable young woman.

The courtiers assigned to Diana were of the highest caliber—a signal that the Queen wanted her to be thoroughly tutored. Susan Hussey, who had been close to Charles since his boyhood, was a trusted lady-in-waiting to the Queen. Hussey was intelligent and experienced, with a strong personality and a no-nonsense view of life. Because of her long-standing affection for Charles and the Queen, whom she had served since 1960, Hussey took her assignment seriously. She offered Diana advice on protocol and other aspects of royal life. “I know from talking to her at length that she helped Diana,” said a former Palace aide.

At the time, Diana seemed to regard Hussey as an elder sister—or at least, she wrote her letters to that effect—but she later claimed to have felt quite differently. “She thought Susan Hussey was slightly in love with Charles,” said one of Diana’s close friends. “Diana felt Susan loathed her from the moment she walked in.” With the benefit of hindsight, it seems obvious that Susan Hussey’s friendship with Charles would create a
wedge—as Michael Colborne said, she was “
two hundred percent behind the Prince of Wales”—and that her powerful personality would intimidate Diana. “She wasn’t sympathetic, and she would not tolerate anything that didn’t conform to royal behavior,” said a friend of the Queen Mother’s.

Another high-ranking courtier tapped to assist Diana was Edward Adeane, a punctilious bachelor nine years older than Prince Charles who had been his private secretary since 1979. Like the Spencers, the Adeane family had served the royal family over the years; Edward’s father, Sir Michael, had worked as the Queen’s private secretary. Known for his serious intellect and rigid personality, Edward Adeane was an austere figure whose temperament was less than ideal to tutor a skittish nineteen-year-old.
Although Diana later said she admired and got along with him, she made it known at the time that she considered him too formal for her taste.

Diana fared somewhat better with Francis Cornish, Adeane’s thirty-nine-year-old assistant, and Oliver Everett, another Buckingham Palace veteran summoned by Charles from a diplomatic post in Spain to be Diana’s first private secretary. Both men were veterans of the foreign service.
They instructed Diana on the public requirements of her role; Everett in particular made himself available to listen to her concerns and brief her about events she would attend and people she would meet. “Before the wedding, Oliver was very supportive to her,” said a fellow Palace aide.

Yet Diana felt vaguely uncomfortable with all of them—at times, with good reason, because they couldn’t help being patronizing. To Diana, they seemed stuffy and reserved, with the exception of Michael Colborne, Charles’s personal secretary who handled his financial accounts and helped organize his private life. After serving with Colborne in the navy, Charles had hired him as an aide in 1975. “
I was not the usual type of person to do that job,” Colborne said. “I was the first graduate of grammar school [the English equivalent of an American public school]. I was known as a rough diamond, and I was.”

Twenty-five years her senior, Colborne was a soothing presence for Diana. “
I was Uncle Michael to her,” he recalled. She shared an office with Colborne, and she spent many hours unburdening her apprehensions to him. “She was very unnerved by it all,” Colborne recalled. “At one point she said, ‘Do you think I’ll change?’ I said ‘You will change in five years. You will be a b-i-t-c-h because you won’t be able to help it. You will expect people to wait on you.’ ”

At first, Diana was completely intimidated by the Queen. When Robert Runcie, the Archbishop of Canterbury, sat between Diana and her future mother-in-law at a meeting on the eve of the engagement announcement, he could see that “
Diana was terrified of her.” In her own fashion, the Queen tried to help Diana relax. “
I hope to see her every now and then,” the
Queen wrote to a friend, “but I hope she will feel free to come and go as she pleases.” Unfortunately, Diana was too intimidated to walk unbidden through the Queen’s open door.

Along the way, Diana’s new family did give her some tips on royal behavior, such as the “royal wave”—cupping the right hand and swiveling it from side to side, “
like screwing a lightbulb, it was all in the wrist,” observed Diana’s future sister-in-law Sarah Ferguson after her first try—and the art of the curtsy.
The Queen Mother offered advice on instructing staff and remembering faces in a crowd. She also showed Diana how she would pause during official visits to ask for the date before signing a visitor’s book; as she lifted her head to inquire, she gave photographers a good picture.
The Queen and Prince Philip demonstrated, by example, their techniques for interacting with the public. The Queen was diligent about memorizing names and places, and Prince Philip was known for making people feel important by asking them what they did, then repeating back to them what they had just said. (“Ah, you’re the baker, are you?”)

Their approach was hardly systematic, however. The royals avoided involvement in one another’s lives, and they assumed that newcomers would work things out on their own. Since their duties were second-nature, they expected Diana to take the initiative and adapt. “
You don’t get training to be Princess of Wales,” said the Queen’s press secretary Michael Shea. “There was never any question of that. It’s a matter of making information available if she wants it. Being Princess of Wales is an education in itself.”

All the experts and briefing papers and instructions only disoriented Diana: “
I was terrified, really. Everything was all over the place,” she later said. Diana considered it unfair that she had to conform to strict royal rules. “The royal family are not like us,” said a friend of the Queen who knew Diana well. “They cannot be, bless their hearts. It is difficult to find yourself in that world and have your wings clipped.” When Diana attended royal receptions and garden parties, she could no longer simply enjoy herself; she had to charm and converse with hundreds of people while enduring the piercing gaze of the tabloid press. “
For Diana, royal life was like a movie,” said her friend Roberto Devorik. “She thought royalty was one thing when she was growing up. Then she opened the back door of royalty and couldn’t cope with it.”

Instead of protecting her, the palace walls became a formidable barrier, preventing her from leading her old life and blocking spontaneous visits by her roommates and school friends. “
It was as though she had been whisked off to an ivory tower … never to be seen again,” said her friend Carolyn Bartholomew. It wasn’t quite that bad, because Diana did entertain them from time to time at small lunches in her sitting room, usually along with her mother and her sister Jane. But all visitors had to arrive through the
front gates and cross the vast expanse of the forecourt, in full view of gawking tourists, to an entrance guarded by a footman. It was an intimidating experience for Diana’s young friends, so they didn’t come as often as they might have. “
I missed my girls so much,” Diana said. “I wanted to go back there and sit and giggle like we used to and borrow clothes and chat about silly things.” Perhaps most telling of all, she said she yearned to be “in my safe shell again.”